Latest data has Oscars Ratings up about 6% (see here and here), a little above 30 million viewers.
This was inline with what I imagined.
If you’re looking for Winners and actual info on the show, here ya go and here.
-
Update 2/23 – Oscars Ratings up about 10% (see here and here) putting the ratings around 33 million. Not a great bump from recent trends… Review the last 50 years of ratings here.
Certainly the show was better than in the last decade, but as someone commented below… the movies nominated largely had small fan bases and Hugh Jackman, though very talented, also has a smallish fan base. To get the extra 5-10 million viewers above the base of 30 million it really does appear that the fan base size of the nominated pitches matters – biggest years feature some of the biggest movies (and movie stars) or all time – See Titantic, Forest Gump, Ghandi, Braveheart. Recession and raging wars seem to dampen viewership – see 1968, 69, 86,87, 2003. (in 2003 it was held in march and competed with first Operation Iraqi Freedom mission and March Madness basketball).
All that said, the households tuning into the Oscars is largely unchanged in 50 years. Some 21 million plus homes watch it every year. Only in the year of Titanic, the most popular box office film ever, was the telecast audience significantly changed. The issue of Oscar ratings comes down to the expectation of growth. I can’t find a telecast, other than the SuperBowl, maintaining this size of an audience for so long. Perhaps an interesting question might be why we expect the Oscar audience to grow when the movie going audience hasn’t really grown and the Internet’s dominance in celebrity has (see below).
If you’re looking for results, here ya go and here.
——————
It’s about 2 hours to showtime.
The ratings will be down again, despite efforts to liven up the show. The ratings troubles have nothing to do with the show nor do they even reflect the public overall interest in the Oscars.
Somewhat related to my post yesterday, the Internet is destroying any media franchise that draws audience primarily on gossip, pics of celebrity and “results”. The Internet provides all of that better than TV does (like Time’s live blog), without the 4 hours of TV commitment and annoying commercials.
Yes, of course, competing media, the recession and general lack of Oscar marketing isn’t helping the ratings.
-
The Conicidence of Wants, the conceptual basis of our money system, has this formulation:
The phrase double coincidence of wants was used in Jevons (1893). “[T]he first difficulty in barter is to find two persons whose disposable possessions mutually suit each other’s wants. There may be many people wanting, and many possessing those things wanted; but to allow of an act of barter there must be a double coincidence, which will rarely happen.”
Basically, barter doesn’t scale because it requires trading parties to be present and have what other parties want at the right times and locations.
The Internet destroys this inefficiency. In kind trading is rampant on the Internet. In fact, it’s a foundational component of how web pages, search engines, ad networks, p2p networks and pretty much everything else works online. From the hyperlink to bittorrent to YouTube. No money exchanges hands – just in kind trades of art, coding, content, and sometimes even physical goods (many cd/dvd, purse, shoes, cars swap sites exist).
Right now the world has a multitude of fundamental changes underway – I posit these almost all have ties to the Internet and the above destruction of physical inefficiences. Pundits, historians, economists, political scientists banter about various theories but few of them discuss with any seriousness the impact of the Internet. Perhaps only in the case of Obama’s campaign has anyone seriously claimed it was a fundamental game changer. Micro donations en masse flat out crushed the old competitive process of knocking on doors and expensive dinners to raise money and garner votes. Obama’s campaign no longer had inefficiences of time and space to contend with – the double coincidence of finding wanting voters at a time when they could listen to the message and provide a donation was not so rare.
However, this effect of the Internet is not limited to political campaigns. The Internet completely eliminated all old media models. This past weeks court case of ThePirateBay is the latest high profile example. Just like napster before it, ThePirateBay simply connects trading parties -and there is no one in the middle controlling the currency, extracting a cut. This week also saw some controversy with Last.fm and RIAA. It too is based on this shift.
The media industry lived of the time and space limits for hundreds of years. It controlled distribution and was in the middle of the flow of money. Now that the distribution problem is completely gone (all the parts inbetween the recording of the media and the consumption of it – all now mostly done on computers), there is no media industry as we knew it. The media industry has never really been about the media or the content, it’s always been about who controls distribution. (Hell, even the great Ben Franklin new that when he “helped improve the postal system”). Creators and consumers are now directly connected – sometimes there’s a search engine inbetween, sometimes a social network or an IM or an email or an SMS.
Additional examples of this reality are the NYTimes company problems, Microsoft’s Balmer wanting more openness from Apple, Facebook’s Privacy back and forth…
This overturning of the foundation is not limited to politics and media. Literally, our entire modern economic theory of money is upended by the Internet. Information used to be controlled by a small set of outlets. It is now completely distributed. Since money was disengaged from coinage and precious metals in the 70s the value of our currency is completely based on “belief in future value” and that belief is formed from our interaction information. Now that information flows so freely without controlling parties, it’s getting harder and harder press value statements on consumers.
Some economists and historians claim that history gives us clues about how our current situations will turn out. I just don’t buy it. There was no Internet in the 1930s nor in the 50s nor in the 70s. This isn’t about “the world is flat” logic. This is about the complete destruction of value system supporting current economic theory. When you don’t need a physical currency to trade goods nor do you have physical constraints, the theory, rules, values of the past simply can’t hold. The old theories and policies based on those theories relied on the concept of “scarce goods”. In a mostly information world, what is scarce? (yes, information requires physical goods to be created and transmitted, but generally we’re not even close to getting a scarcity of computing, bandwidth and information consumption.)
The implications of the destruction of our old sense of values can be found in:
- The passing of over 1.5 trillion dollars in government spending (does anyone even know how much that really is and what its really going to do?) without a voter uproar
- Home values going down the tube this fast
- The pending failure of major print media giants (NyTimes, Tribune)
- Yahoo going from a $40 billion acquisition to $16 billion market cap in weeks
- Car buying behavior – off 45% from “annual averages”
Money has lost its correlation with actual value in all those above examples. No amount of money is going to solve the US economic issues. The government uses big dollar figures as a value statement – “we’ll spare no expense to keep you safe” – not that the dollars can actually generate physical value in an information world.
Home values aren’t going to recover quickly in a world where “the American dream” of a home in the country was left in the dust by metropolis build out, going green and the hard facts that our former most desirable places to live happen to be bankrupt (California) or under constant natural threat (gulf coast and eastern seaboard).
The print companies are finished not because they don’t have the right content or the advertisers left for a better medium – they don’t control the distribution mechanism anymore. They pay higher and higher levies to get their product in front of users while users move to 100000s of alternatives on the Internet.
Yahoo lost the battle of information. It’s value isn’t tied to much of what value it actually brings to users or advertisers. It had perceived value – the promise of a future buyout by someone silly enough to buy it. That was exposed and now it’s just a clearinghouse for super cheap CPM campaigns and low cost pay per click search buying. (This is the reality of brand advertising online right now…)
Car buyers have left from high prices, wrong vehicles, gas trouble, sure. In this process though, they also learned, perhaps, that you don’t need a great car to go about your business. So many things can be done online that used to take physical travel. Banking, meetings, grocery store trips, shopping, post office trips, movie rentals… these things add up. The time and space part of these activities have been eliminated and the auto companies relied on our formerly ever growing need to travel to cross the chasm.
An analysis of the impact of the Internet and increasing the probability of double coincidence of wants in all facets of modern life is required to create policies, businesses and culture that can be sustained.
-
In the most “Duh, I knew that already” post of the decade…
It’s not all negative out there. Some businesses actually benefit quite a bit in economically challenging times.
Some key examples:
- The job sites are all growing like a weed
- Cheaper packaged goods and discount retail, obviously, are doing well
- McDonald’s is growing (this article is very interesting… McDonald’s is playing in currency!)
- Higher Ed should start doing better
I’m sure their are more examples.
Death, taxes, food, water, seeking work, support, debt… can’t escape those things no matter the economic conditions.
-
Ok privacy and data is mine fanatics – get real!
Changing the TOS does nothing to protect your data or save it from misuse. You already put it on the Internet. Should you decide you don’t want your data on Facebook, there would be no possible way for Facebook to remove the data from the site without completely dismantling the service. Even legally there’s nothing you can do. When you send an email, who’s data is it? when you query google, whose data is it? when you use your cell phone and leave a message, whose data is it? Browsing listings on your DirecTV, whose data is it? If someone posts information about you to one of these services, who’s data is it?
Facebook was RIGHT to update the TOS to be an actual reflection of the reality of using web site. Users want an older, useless TOS to make them feel better but the reality is no document can supercede the physical and literal reality of what happens with your data once you connect to anything.
Read Google’s TOS again. Read WebMDs. Read YouTubes and MySpaces. You can find similar faults more or less with all of them. On some level all of them get your data through your use and there’s always a way to wiggle the issues.
So… if you don’t want someone to have your data, don’t connect to the service. Better yet, don’t interact with anyone at all who might connect to a service.
Sorry, this is the reality of the digital world.
-
High School Musical wipes the floor with Spectacular!….
Would you ever guess that one of the big media battles would be about high school students who sing and dance?
Nickelodeon unvieled “Spectacular!” tonight during primetime. It roughly follows the High School Musical formula, which followed the Grease formula. It’s the same vanilla storyline with similarly pop, radio-ready (depending on your taste) music. The stars fit the basic good looking mold, even the “nerds” and outcasts. Heartbreak, redemption and happy endings.
So what?! Why post on this?
It’s pretty clear that Disney has a really strong multi-platform strategy that’s crushing the competition (everyone!). High School Musical and other recent Disney franchises are everywhere – in every medium, every device, every which way.
I suspect Viacom (MTV, Nickelodeon…) are looking at the particular franchises and not the overall strategy. Yes, the franchise contents matter, but I’m wondering if the multi-platform commitment and integrated promotion isn’t more important. Nickelodeon’s multi-platform approach is very weak.
Consider the website for Spectacular. A) It was hard to find in Google B) it is covered with ads for random products (including overlays) c) It doesn’t work well in firefox d) it has no merchandise or cross promotions.
Consider Nickelodeon’s retail presence. There isn’t a Nick store in every mall. Its characters are licensed out to some of the lamest manufacturers and retailers. Nick doesn’t have theme parks or any other way for fans to experience the Nick franchises.
Combine those negatives with a knock-off property that is maybe a B- TV movie and this is not looking good as an investment by Viacom.
By my estimation it’s not going to be enough for a media company to just compete on cable TV or in the box office. You have to manage all of it and manage it well.
I guess we’ll see if Nick gets some value from Spectacular! when the ratings and first revenue reports come in. My guess is that it’s a bust.
There’s something else going on here too. The economy is putting severe pressure on all forms of media companies. Media has to produce hits faster and cheaper than ever. The Internet companies compete with the film studies with the magazines with book publishers with retailers …. everyone just has a different entry point to the consumer. Worse for the media companies – users get to compete for eyeballs now too!
Based on the approach of Viacom recently – sueing YouTube/Google, removing embeds from MTV, knock-off High School Musicals… they clearly have not figured out how to compete.
-
You might have seen this proposal request from Mark Cuban.
I went ahead and threw a hat into the ring with Angel Technology.
Let’s see what happens, eh?
It’s a brave new world out there, time to compete.
-
Update 2/17/09: Here’s a fun piece on CNN about MDs using Twitter from the OR. Again, this is NOT particular useful data being generated. It is, however, an excellent BROADCAST tool. Surgeons pushing out updates is useful to families and friends. In the grand scheme of useful information unto itself, this content will have no reuse outside of that surgical operation context. Perhaps an aggregation and synthesis (not real time) would be useful in trending operations, but there are other, more efficient, ways of computing and comparing data from operations.
Ok, so perhaps, this is why VCs, media pundits and internet geeks gush over Twitter: The idea that it represents some collective thought stream/collective brain.
The most common statement about why this colletive stream of drivel has value comes in this excerpt from the TechCrunch post:
Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, try searching for “iPhone,”
“Zune,” or “Volvo wagon”.Viewing the proposed examples SEEMS to validate the claim. However, online discussion and online “tweets” are NOT the same as the behavior you’re actually trying to gain insight into. Whether people are into a brand is not accurately assesed by viewing what they SAY about it — it’s what they DO about it. Do people BUY the brand? Do they SHOW the brand/products to others? Do they consume the brand?
These above examples are not predictive in anyway. They are reflective. Twitter can’t do much better than Google, blogs, and news outlets at ferreting out important events, people, products, and places before they are important. Twitter, in some respects gets in its own way because the amount of “tweet” activity is not always a great indicator of importance. In fact, some of the most mundane events, people and places get a ton of twitter activity versus really important stuff.
Twitter is also highly biased. It is predominately used by the technical/digtial elite. Yes, it’s growing quickly, but it still doesn’t reflect more than perhaps 1-2% of the US population. Heck, even Google traffic is highly biased, as only 50% of the US population uses search every day. You say, so what, it will get there! No, it won’t. Consider the following examples.
Twitter can’t tell you ANYTHING about the real stuff of life like Baby Food, Peanut (recall), or your local hospital. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to try these searches on Google and compare the results). With more usage, this only gets more impossible to find the real information. New tools to parse and organize tweets must be created. This implies you’ll need computational time to parse it all, thus destroying the “real time part” the techcrunch authors and this quoted blogger adore. Beyond just filtering and categorizing, an engine needs some method to find the “accurate” and “authoritative” data stream. Twitter provides no mechanism of this and doing so would destroy it’s general user value (you don’t want to have to compete with more authoritative twitterers, do you?) Twitter search would need to become more “Googly” to matter at all in some bigger world or commerce sense.
TechCrunch correctly identifies this problem:
An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns).
So where does Twitter really sit and does it have value? It is a replacement for the newsgroup and chatroom and some IM functions. It has value, obviously, because people use it. Users replace their other forms of conversation with Twittering. Broadcasters and publishers are also replacing other forms of broadcasting/pushing messages with Twitter. This, too, has value in that Twitter better fits the toolsets more and more of us sit in front of all day long. It’s somewhat of a “natural” evolution of things to find a new mechanism of broadcasting when a medium (terminals attached to the network) reaches critical mass. The hudson river landing example is a better example of the shift in broadcasting method than it is of some crack in the value of Google and others for a value to have “real time search.” If that logic were sound, CNN would been hailed as a “Google Slayer” as they are more real time than Twitter is (yes, they use twitter and ireport and citizen journalism…). In fact, CNN is the human powered analytic filter required to make sense of real time streams of data. News journalists capture all that incoming data and find the useful and accurate information and summarize and rebroadcast.
If I were an operator of IM networks or a business that relied on chatrooms and forums, I’d be worried. Google, news outlets and other portals should not be worried. They don’t need more contextless content to sift through, they do just fine without yet another 99% source of throw-away thoughts.
I, myself, am not a Twitter-hater. It is a great media success. It probably can make money. However, it doesn’t represent some shift in social networking, high tech, communications, much less how we interact. Anyone who claims that must be delusional or hoping to make a buck or two, which is fine too.
TechCrunch concludes with the real question here:
But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.
Is there a possibility to generate a collective thoughtstream? big Internet brain? Sure, in some loose sense, that’s already happened. Twitter (and other tools) is just a piece of the puzzle. The human brain doesn’t have just one piece you can claim as the main part – the CPU that can make sense of everything. Why should we think something less complicated (the Internet has far fewer nodes, interconnections and far higher energy demands than just one human brain!) have a central core (service) providing some dominant executive function? There are several reasons this physically can’t happen. The main thing, I mentioned it earlier, is that making sense of random streams of data requires computational time. The more inputs a system takes in, the more computation it requires to make sense (or to filter it in the first place). New information or new types of information must first be identified as potentially useful before they can even be included for summarization. And so on. The more useful you need to make entropic data (random), the more energy you need expend. Raw data streams trend toward entropy, yes in an informatic and thermodynamic sense.
In other words, no one company is going to figure out how to rank real time search results – it can’t be done. Perhaps more damning is, it doesn’t need to be done. There’s no actual value in searching real time. The idea of searching is that there is some order (filter) to be applied. When something happens, John Borthwick, correctly claims “relevancy is driven mostly by time”. So twitter already has the main ordinal, time, as it’s organizing principle. Perhaps TC and John Borthwick desire a “authority” metric on tweet search… however, you can’t physically do this without destroying the value of real time. No algorithm accounting for authority will be completely accurate -there’s a trade off with real time and authority. (PageRank has the similar problem with authority and raw relevancy, as no name authors and pages often have EXACTLY what you want but you can’t find them. This is a more damaging problem in “real time” scenerios where you want the RIGHT data at the RIGHT TIME).
If Twitter could plant an authoritative twitterer at every important event and place, real time twitter search might become real.
Oh wait, that’s called Journalism – we already have 1000s of sources of that.
-
I jokingly made a site Can’t Blame Me!. Sadly, TIME doesn’t get the joke and actually thinks they can identify people to blame. Or maybe they did get the joke and thought a similar concept on their site would generate some traffic.
Let’s be clear: there’s no way to blame anyone. It just is. There’s no way to draw a casual chain that would allow you to blame GWB anymore than you can blame yourself. If everyone is equally (or not equally but undecibly so) to blame, you can’t blame anyone.
Social Mode 